The sun descended in all its glory. My parents and I set out from home and headed towards a popular café in the neighbourhood. Upon reaching, my mother and I proceeded to place our orders.
Despite our repeated attempts at garnering attention – first with the usual “Excuse me” and then with the harsher knock on the glass slab over the counter – the waiters did not look up from their unsolved crossword puzzles.
As voices of men floated in the air, the waiters looked straight past us at a few male customers and processed their orders attentively and enthusiastically. Our orders were similarly processed soon after, except this time my father was placing them. My mother and I gazed with blank expressions. We existed, but we were not recognised by the café waiters as decision-makers.
In another instance, after closing the sale of a bag to me, the cashier returned the change, winking at his colleagues and insinuating victory over the “weaker” sex. As I counted the notes one by one, his eyes suddenly protruded against a pallid face in an unblinking stare.
He had already reached for the cash-drawer by the time I stopped counting because I found that he had handed me less money than the actual amount owed in change.
This is a recurring scenario in many women’s lives – neglected as finance-controllers, faced with attempts of cheating as they handle money, given less than what is their due share of financial property, and not trusted with money.
The origin of this problem can be traced back to the way a child is culturally socialised. “A man can lead his life without a woman, but a woman needs a man throughout her life” – a holy chant that a girl in Bangladesh customarily grows up with.
The reason, you ask? One of the needs of a woman that a man is entrusted to fulfil is economic support. This is also a need which forces a woman to remain in an abusive relationship. Young girls are taught to rely first on the father (or the next closest male kin), and then on the husband or son. As a result, children are conditioned to believe that earning and making major purchase decisions are best left to a man.
The problem is further compounded when the men in a family are pushed towards well-paid jobs and academic disciplines involving mathematics, finance, and technology, whereas the women are held back from doing the same: a flicker of ambition in her eyes and she is deemed a threat to family values.
Mainstream films and TV soaps continue to promote this idea. In 2012, I was surprised to learn from one of my lecturers at North South University that he had a female student in class whose family prioritised her brother’s education more. While the female student got an allowance for two courses per semester, her brother received the fees for four or even five courses every semester.
Religion plays a crucial role in the socialisation process. In 2011, the Bangladeshi government approved the National Women Development Policy (NWDP), three years after it was proposed by the caretaker regime.
The policy included provisions for the equal participation of women in employment, wealth, and education. More specifically, it granted women full control over earnings and inherited property.
This was met with strong protests – once after the proposal in 2008 and again after approval in 2011 – by religious hardliners who misconstrued the policy as one granting equal inheritance rights (in certain Islamic traditions, a woman is entitled to half of her brother’s share even if she is the one who spends on the household), and branded it as an anti-Islamic propaganda. In Hindu traditions, a woman has limited rights to inheritance. In practice, divisions of inheritance are generally administered by male relatives and scholars.
Fast-forward to 2013. A sermon recorded on video and released on Facebook and YouTube caused nationwide outrage in Bangladesh. In the video, a 93-year old preacher alludes to women as a source of temptation like “tamarinds and even worse.”
He casts aspersions on the chastity of women working in the garments industry, a sector that is the backbone of Bangladeshi economy and that employs mostly women. He admonishes parents to avoid educating girls beyond grades 4-5.
Radical clerics who held similar views were largely ignored by the masses, but what makes this man especially dangerous and prominent is his substantial political and social power.
Based in Bangladesh, he is the principal of a Madrasa, the head of Qawmi Madrasa Education Board, the leader of an extremist fringe group that opposes the NWDP and education policy, and an active political campaigner that shows allegiance to the current mainstream opposition party in the country.
In 2012, Women and Child Development Ministry of India proposed a law that would mandate husbands to “pay” a monthly salary to their wives for doing daily household chores. The amount will be tax-exempt and predetermined by the government.
The amount is estimated to be around 10-20% of the man’s monthly salary that is to be deposited in his wife’s bank account. While the policy was lauded – by feminist lawmakers and homemakers alike – for being sensitive to the economic deprivation faced by housewives, I felt a key issue – apart from the social implications of the policy that was trivialising a marital relationship to a kind of employment contract – was still dangling in the air: rights of a woman to her own source of earning and to her control over finance.
If the policy is passed, the woman will still be fully dependent on someone else to bear her expenses. She is not being motivated to be economically self-sufficient and to exercise significant control over her spending and saving decisions.
Women entrepreneurship is not well-received in Bangladesh. According to the Economic Census (2001-2003), women own approximately 3% of all enterprises. The businesses are concentrated mainly in traditional sectors, namely agriculture, beauty and fashion, handicrafts, and fast food.
Various research studies in the past five years reveal women’s low access to bank loans and other institutional funds due to, for instance, prolonged loan-processing time. The poor, socially marginalised women face the full brunt due to assumed lack of creditworthiness on double counts – first for being poor and then for being women.
While the government and NGOs are offering special women economic development programmes and micro-credit schemes to redress the situation, a more conscious effort at the grassroots level is required.
Weeks before Eid-ul-Fitr last year, I went to a local bank to collect and deposit a stipend I had received. Stepping into the establishment, I felt I was thrust into a foreign terrain. Like sporadic bursts of blue and green in the arid desert, women – both as employees and as customers – made an insignificant composition of the total population there.
Heads turned and stares lingered as I made myself comfortable on a revolving-chair at the bank premises. In this same bank, the mandatory official forms and other formal communication materials started with “Dear Sir” (without any reference to “Madam”) – a subtle indication of how women have been pushed to the backdrop of the banking scene.
Economic freedom is a powerful means of empowering women. While it is not demeaning to receive financial support from family members (in fact, it is a defining principle of family values in Bangladesh to share resources), women should be on the “contributing” end as well.
Currently earning, I make it a habit to pay the bill fully or at least partially when accompanied by a man at any restaurant or shop. It reflects my willingness and ability to take financial responsibility and to share the burden unfairly imposed solely upon a man. It reflects that a woman is not just a spender of resources taxing a man’s wallet unnecessarily, she can also be a thoughtful partner.
We are now in 2014; contemporary times as people say. The discussion on women’s contribution to the society, including housework that is monetarily unaccounted for is being rekindled, and that is commendable.
However, all stakeholders need to integrate the above findings in all of its research and awareness campaigns. The government too will find these discoveries useful before it sets out on another policy-making mission this season.